When Obama endorsed Prop. 50 in California, Democrats lost their soul | Opinion
By going all in on Proposition 50 in California, Democrats rejected party ideals on built on empathy to stir the same fears they vowed to overcome. Gov. Gavin Newsom sold Californians on cheating to counter the cheating of President Donald Trump. If Trump could get Texas to redraw its congressional districts to favor Republicans, California was going to fight fire with fire, Newsom said. How sad.
Handing politicians the power to redraw districts isn’t just a step backward—it deepens wounds in a state that allows culture war politics to take center stage over dire issues like housing and the rising cost of living.
Hope now lies with those who refuse to see our politics as a zero-sum game—those who urgently cling to the belief that cooperation can still rescue our country.
Yet Prop 50 threatens to snuff out that hope, dividing us further at a moment when unity is desperately needed.
Newsom disregarded Michelle Obama’s famous words, “when they go low, we go high,” during a Sept. 30 meeting with the McClatchy California Editorial Board.
“We’re not going to sit back and watch this democracy, this republic, get destroyed because they expected us to ‘Go high when they go low,’” Newsom said—words that landed like a punch to anyone still yearning for something better.
Newsom’s disdain for Michelle Obama’s words cut deep, sowing the kind of anxiety and dread I felt at Trump rallies back in Nashville, Tennessee.
At that moment, the chilling realization emerged: “We’re becoming just like them.”
Even Barack Obama, whose voice once summoned people to rise above cynicism, endorsed Prop 50, his ad airing as swiftly as hope seemed to vanish.
For so many who were captivated by Obama’s promise of hope in 2008, his endorsement of Prop 50 was a gut punch. That campaign years ago conveyed a message to millions of marginalized Americans that they desperately needed to hear: this country is their home, too.
Now, Obama and other Democrats are adopting the same “us v. them” mentality that drives this current culture war.
In his 2006 book, Obama observed that Americans were weary of “distortion, name-calling and sound-bite solutions” from politicians.
Nearly two decades later, those same tactics were endorsed by Obama, as if he never offered the hope of something better. As if he stopped believing in the hope that got him to the White House.
Democracy isn’t a culture war
Yes, we must always defend our freedoms, but not every battle is won by shouting into the void of social media. Real change demands more: empathy, urgency, and action that rises above division.
Donald Trump stoked panic over a fabricated ‘trans attack’ on the nation and won an election. And now, Newsom has successfully stoked the flames of fear with Prop 50, granting politicians new power and pushing millions of Californians, especially conservatives, further to the margins. He might even run for governor now.
Both men, in their rush to win, wage political war as a means to an end. But the cost is steep: each day, the cycle of hatred spins faster, risking the very soul of our democracy. The cycle of fear grows faster than our willingness to listen.
“No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics,” Obama once wrote, “the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consistency to tackle any big problem.”
Obama and Democrats are now playing fire with fire, and it’s only a matter of time before our democracy, and the people it’s meant to serve, get burned.
